TRAVEL WRITING JOURNAL ENTRIES
My travels around South America in 2003 were exhilarating, fresh and fantastic experiences for me.
We visited Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia and I jotted down my thoughts and observations, which I'm happy to be sharing with you!
Friday 1st August 2003 - Quito to Otavalo
We woke early and had our breakfast of freshly squeezed fruit juice, a plate of different fruits, coffee and bread before checking out of the hotel and heading down towards the Terminal Terrestre de Cumanda - the central bus station. We had only just arrived when we were frantically asked "Otavalo? Otavalo? Venga! Venga!" and we were bustled onto a bus which had stopped by the side of the road.
On we clambered and luckily there was enough room for us to keep our bags with us. From here, the bus stopped practically every twenty yards to let more people on until we left Quito. The journey was pretty hair-raising once we were on the open road as the driver sped up and whirled around the corners, which were sheer vertical drops! There were llamas, waterfalls, volcanoes and magnificent scenery as we crossed the equator back into the northern hemisphere. We stopped briefly along the way for the money collectors at the front to hop off and buy a couple of huge bunches of mini bananas. Closer to Otavalo, more indigenous people climbed aboard and we both shared our seats with little old ladies with parcels of clothing or material tied to their backs.
We finally arrived at Otavalo bus station after three hours and disembarked, feeling and looking totally lost and helpless, I expect. However, after a quick perusal of the guide book, we set off in the direction of the town. I had attempted to call a hotel in Otavalo that morning but had not really understood what the proprietor had been saying so we decided our best bet was to search out some free hotels or hostels as we wandered. We were very lucky as the second one we tried had a free room and they seemed very nice. Afterwards when we checked the guide book it had recommendations for the place, calling it a "...little known homestead...a hidden gem, indigenous owned and operated."
Once we had dropped our stuff in the room and rearranged our valuables we decided to go and explore. Otavalo is a lovely little town and it was so peaceful. There were market stalls set up in the central plaza with brightly coloured rugs and bags and beautiful items. It was a really nice change to Quito as we felt really safe here. I spotted a few things in the market I wanted to buy but we decided to wait until the next day when the market was supposed to spread outwards to all of the surrounding streets too. We had yet another very nice lunch and walked around the whole of Otavalo, which is a really nice small-sized town.
We went out for dinner to a little Mexican place and had nachos with guacamole and a burrito. I had another jugo de maracuya y pina. Delicious!
written by Christina Francis-Gilbert, the 23 year old traveller
Saturday 2nd August 2003 - Market day in Otavalo
The next morning, we had a wonderful view from our window of the mountain, the top of which we hadn't been able to see the day before because of the cloud. It was lovely and at about 7am the sun burst out from behind it and shine so brightly into our room. I had my first freezing cold shower, which was unbelievably cold. I survived whilst Oli the wimp didn't even put his big toe in!
It wasn't long before we were enjoying our breakfast in a little place called Shenandoa, where we had pineapple pie and apple pie with ice cream and I had another fruit jugo. I'm getting addicted to these things. We could look out onto the centre of the market where people were still setting up their stalls of beautiful, colourful rugs, wall hangings, ponchos, scarfs, hats, gloves made from alpaca wool, bracelets, jewellery, panama hats and numerous people wandering about selling fruits and nuts and ice cream. It was brilliant.
After breakfast we went a little bit crazy and bought lots of things. My first attempt at haggling was a disaster as I managed to get all of one dollar knocked from the price of a lovely, blue wall hanging with Ecuador written across it. Oh well...we had more luck the next few times! However, we got some lovely stuff and so I hope there's room in our bags for our new purchases,
We went back to Shenandoa for lunch and filled up with a huge cheese, guacamole onion, pepper and tomato sandwich, which was delicious but very filling. We then went and sat in the palm-tree filled plaza for a while, watching people to-ing and fro-ing and a row of shoe-shiners set up for business. The blue sky and sunshine of the morning had now turned overcast as it had yesterday.
For our evening dinner, we went to a weird place called Sahara where we had a pizza sitting on cushions with a low table. It was a typical backpackers' place, even though there were also some locals. They advertised pipas de agua with different fruit flavours, which we had to try. We had strawberry flavour with a great strawberry aroma.
written by Christina Francis-Gilbert, the 23 year old traveller
